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Climate change has thrown our beautifully balanced planet into chaos. As oceans and forests transform and ecosystems go into shock, perhaps a million species teeter on the edge of extinction. But there may still be hope for these organisms. Some will change their behaviors in response to soaring global temperatures; they might, say, reproduce earlier in the year, when it’s cooler. Others may even evolve to cope—perhaps by shrinking, because smaller frames lose heat more quickly.

For the moment, though, scientists have little idea how these adaptations may be playing out. A new paper in Nature Communications, coauthored by more than 60 researchers, aims to bring a measure of clarity. By sifting through 10,000 previous studies, the researchers found that the climatic chaos we’ve sowed may just be too intense [Editor's note: The researchers scanned 10,000 abstracts, but their analysis is based on data from 58 studies]. Some species seem to be adapting, yes, but they aren’t doing so fast enough. That spells, in a word, doom.

To determine how a species is adjusting to a climate gone mad, you typically look at two things: morphology and phenology. Morphology refers to physiological changes, like the aforementioned shrinking effect; phenology has to do with the timing of life events such as breeding and migration. The bulk of the existing research concerns phenology.

The species in the new study skew avian, in large part because birds are relatively easy to observe. Researchers can set up nesting boxes, for instance, which allow them to log when adults lay eggs, when chicks hatch, how big the chicks are, and so on. And they can map how this is all changing as the climate warms.

By looking at these kinds of studies together, the authors of the Nature Communications paper found that the 17 bird species they examined seem to be shifting their phenology. “Birds in the Northern Hemisphere do show adaptive responses on average, though these adaptive responses are not sufficient in order for populations to persist in the long term,” says lead author Viktoriia Radchuk of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.

In other words, the birds simply can’t keep up. By laying their eggs earlier, they’re encouraging their chicks to hatch when there are lots of insects to eat, which happens once temperatures rise in spring. But they’re not shifting quickly enough.

This isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to human-caused climate change. Life on Earth is so diverse because it’s so adaptable: temperatures go up or down, and a species might move into a new habitat and evolve to become something different over time. But what we humans have unleashed on this planet is unparalleled. “We’re experiencing something on the order of 1,000 times faster change in temperature than what was seen in paleo times,” says Radchuk. “There are limits to these adaptive responses, and the lag is getting too big.”

Which means now more than ever, we have to aggressively conserve habitats to help boost species. “I think the results of this paper really add an abundance of caution, that we shouldn't hope that species will adapt to changing climate and changing habitats, that we don't need to do anything,” says Mark Reynolds, lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy’s migratory bird program, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Indeed, this paper is a terrifying window into what might be happening to ecosystems at large. A bird doesn’t live in a vacuum—it preys and is preyed upon. An ecosystem is unfathomably complex, all sorts of creatures interacting, which makes these dynamics extremely difficult to study, especially when Earth’s climate is changing so quickly.

“It's not an Internet type of network, it's not an electrical grid,” says Peter Roopnarine, curator of geology and paleontology at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in this work. “These are systems that have very specific structures and configurations to them. We have poor documentation of that.”

On a very basic level, if insects start breeding earlier in the year because the planet is warming, birds have to shift their life cycles. That means the birds’ predators do, too. “One phenological change in one species can have a ripple effect through the system,” says Roopnarine.

Another major consideration here is generation length. Species that more rapidly produce offspring tend to adapt better to change. That’s why bacteria can so quickly evolve resistance to antibiotics: they proliferate like mad, and individual bacteria with the lucky genetics to survive the drugs win out and pass those genes along. Something like an elephant, which may not reproduce until she’s 20 years into a 50-year lifespan, is working with way longer timescales and may struggle to adapt to change.

What’s so troubling about this study is that, by comparison to other animal families, birds are relatively adaptable in their phenology: they can tweak the timing of their migrations, for instance. A less mobile critter like a frog has no such luxury. But what these researchers have found is that flexibility is no longer enough for salvation.

10 C is more than what is associated with the P-T extinction event (the “great dying”). The K-T event is borderline inconsequential compared to that. And Chixulub was only a portion of the relatively inconsequential event.

I seem to be in pedantic mode today, so....

First, I'm not agreeing with FFLAB's claim that a 10 degree rise is relatively inconsequential.Second, not suggesting that a "merely Chicxulub" level extinction is OK.

But it's worth noting that warming could be greater than that following Chicxulub without causing similar levels of extinction because warming was not the only immediate cause of extinction. So the linear ordering

Pedantic mode off, 10C increase is utter frickin' disaster, could well be on the order of the K-T extinction, and anyone who's telling me it's OK because the comparison point is Chicxulub is only helping confirm that it's an existential threat, so thank you for that.

This IS the 6th Great Extinction. Generally the more complex, larger animals at the top of food chains, that commandeer the greatest resource (recall the ratio of ~10 for each level in a food chain) go extinct. That means H sapiens, though this doesn't seem to have penetrated the minds of many.

Yes it is a big extinction event.

But why would we go extinct? We are not some mere apex animal that dies off if the lower animals die. We breed our own food. We grow our own food. We have greenhouses and farms. We have genetic engineering to make new crops and animals. We are about to grow meat in a vat. Worse case we have to farm cockroaches.

If you think we will go extinct you need to refer to the clathrates melting and changing the atmosphere to something poisonous to us. Even then, do we go extinct or is there a population crash till the conditions improve?

As rapid as the changes are, they are not as rapid as our technological development.

I'd like to say the Republicans would be the first to go; unfortunately they'll be taking the rest of us with them if they get their way. (That's right... animals of a political nature.) Their whole "what was good a hundred years ago will still be good a hundred years from now" attitude about climate change will kill us all.

This IS the 6th Great Extinction. Generally the more complex, larger animals at the top of food chains, that commandeer the greatest resource (recall the ratio of ~10 for each level in a food chain) go extinct. That means H sapiens, though this doesn't seem to have penetrated the minds of many.

Yes it is a big extinction event.

But why would we go extinct? We are not some mere apex animal that dies off if the lower animals die. We breed our own food. We grow our own food. We have greenhouses and farms. We have genetic engineering to make new crops and animals. We are about to grow meat in a vat. Worse case we have to farm cockroaches.

If you think we will go extinct you need to refer to the clathrates melting and changing the atmosphere to something poisonous to us. Even then, do we go extinct or is there a population crash till the conditions improve?

As rapid as the changes are, they are not as rapid as our technological development.

Our technological development is the root of the cause of the rapid changes. 300000 years of history and in 3 centuries we have almost completely destroyed the biosphere.our changes have made the planet too hot to live without that damning technology.

Our technological development is the root of the cause of the rapid changes. 300000 years of history and in 3 centuries we have almost completely destroyed the biosphere.our changes have made the planet too hot to live without that damning technology.

That 'damning technology' is what extended human lifespan from 30 to 75 in just 100 years. I'm sure you'd be the first to ban hospitals from using all that plastic in their IV bags and tubing?

10 C is more than what is associated with the P-T extinction event (the “great dying”). The K-T event is borderline inconsequential compared to that. And Chixulub was only a portion of the relatively inconsequential event.

I seem to be in pedantic mode today, so....

First, I'm not agreeing with FFLAB's claim that a 10 degree rise is relatively inconsequential.Second, not suggesting that a "merely Chicxulub" level extinction is OK.

But it's worth noting that warming could be greater than that following Chicxulub without causing similar levels of extinction because warming was not the only immediate cause of extinction. So the linear ordering

Pedantic mode off, 10C increase is utter frickin' disaster, could well be on the order of the K-T extinction, and anyone who's telling me it's OK because the comparison point is Chicxulub is only helping confirm that it's an existential threat, so thank you for that.

The average summer temperature in the U.S. state of Louisiana is 27.3 degrees C (81.1 Degrees F). A 10 degree C increase would result in an average Temperature of 37.3 degrees C ( 99.14 degrees F). Keep in mind that that is the average. Heatwaves would probably be 10 degrees hotter than that, 47.3 Degrees C (117 degrees F).

That is life threatening temperatures for weeks or maybe months at a time all through the American South. Countries further south would be even worse. Ten or hundreds of millions of people in Central America would have a choice to either move or die. The U.S. would be faced with either allowing a mass migration or mass murder. A quarter of North and South America would be nearly uninhabitable in the summer. Crops would die. That's before you add in the effects of rising sea level.

If we presume the animals in question have existed for more than a few thousand years, and if we accept that holocene climatic optimum was warmer than today, and we see that the animals survived that, then the argument that the modern climate will kill these animals is obviously not accurate.

10 C is more than what is associated with the P-T extinction event (the “great dying”). The K-T event is borderline inconsequential compared to that. And Chixulub was only a portion of the relatively inconsequential event.

I seem to be in pedantic mode today, so....

First, I'm not agreeing with FFLAB's claim that a 10 degree rise is relatively inconsequential.Second, not suggesting that a "merely Chicxulub" level extinction is OK.

But it's worth noting that warming could be greater than that following Chicxulub without causing similar levels of extinction because warming was not the only immediate cause of extinction. So the linear ordering

Pedantic mode off, 10C increase is utter frickin' disaster, could well be on the order of the K-T extinction, and anyone who's telling me it's OK because the comparison point is Chicxulub is only helping confirm that it's an existential threat, so thank you for that.

My claim and likely Wheel’s claim as well: 10 C > P-Tr > K-T

(Fixed a thinko: PETM is the warming coming out of the K-T boundary, I meant the larger extinction event.)

Chicxulub is a subset of K-T. The traps appear to have been significant as well. “We’re warming for a few tens of thousands of years — psych! Let’s blot out the sun for a couple years — ok now we’re warming again.”

Anyway, 10C with no other changes is not possible. We’re also destroying habitat on land, creating hypoxic oceanic zones at the mouths of major rivers, fishing a large fraction of net primary production in the ocean, and releasing lots of pollutants beyond CO2.

We wouldn’t likely see 10C, because we’d be dead long before; if it happens it’s because we cause some major carbon sink to become a self-sustaining source.

If we presume the animals in question have existed for more than a few thousand years, and if we accept that holocene climatic optimum was warmer than today, and we see that the animals survived that, then the argument that the modern climate will kill these animals is obviously not accurate.

If we presume the animals in question have existed for more than a few thousand years, and if we accept that holocene climatic optimum was warmer than today, and we see that the animals survived that, then the argument that the modern climate will kill these animals is obviously not accurate.

If we accept false things we can prove anything!

It is widely accepted that the item we are talking about, surface land and coastal environments, were, on average, warmer during holocene climatic optimum than today.

If we presume the animals in question have existed for more than a few thousand years, and if we accept that holocene climatic optimum was warmer than today, and we see that the animals survived that, then the argument that the modern climate will kill these animals is obviously not accurate.

It is, but you are making an argument appropriate if we were talking about climate change. We are actually talking about effects of a changed climate on animals. In other words, if the climate allows the animals to reproduce, they continue to exist. It makes little difference whether the temperature is achieved over 10,000 years or 1 year, what matters is, can the animal still reproduce in the new temperature? Apparently, yes. These animals will be fine for up to another 0.5C to 1 C raise, based on history.

This very article is about how animals cannot adapt quickly enough to changes brought about by global warming. When those same changes are spread over thousands of years, it is easier for species to adapt. But that is not what is happening in the real world right now.

If we presume the animals in question have existed for more than a few thousand years, and if we accept that holocene climatic optimum was warmer than today, and we see that the animals survived that, then the argument that the modern climate will kill these animals is obviously not accurate.

It is, but you are making an argument appropriate if we were talking about climate change. We are actually talking about effects of a changed climate on animals. In other words, if the climate allows the animals to reproduce, they continue to exist. It makes little difference whether the temperature is achieved over 10,000 years or 1 year, what matters is, can the animal still reproduce in the new temperature? Apparently, yes. These animals will be fine for up to another 0.5C to 1 C raise, based on history.

This very article is about how animals cannot adapt quickly enough to changes brought about by global warming. When those same changes are spread over thousands of years, it is easier for species to adapt. But that is not what is happening in the real world right now.

Yes, I saw that. I was disagreeing with that premise. Now, I cannot say I have experience with every animal type, but every animal type I have had experience with has a wide range of ability to deal with environments which are not entirely optimal. We are talking about a degree of change here, a few degrees Fahrenheit, and treating it like it is any different from imagining that turning up the thermostat 5 degrees will kill your pets. This is absurd.

I appreciate the article subject, it is fascinating, but too apocalyptic. I do not see the evidence for the warning sirens on this one. Watching birds for a few seasons and then sounding an alarm is a bit like watching a softball game for the top of the first inning and declaring a winner. Give nature a chance to catch up.

If you think global warming is comparable to turning the thermostat up by a few degrees in your home, then this really is pointless. You're disagreeing with observed reality. These studies are based on observations that span decades. And you dismiss them out of hand, based on... what exactly? Your experience owning a pet?

If we presume the animals in question have existed for more than a few thousand years, and if we accept that holocene climatic optimum was warmer than today, and we see that the animals survived that, then the argument that the modern climate will kill these animals is obviously not accurate.

If we accept false things we can prove anything!

It is widely accepted that the item we are talking about, surface land and coastal environments, were, on average, warmer during holocene climatic optimum than today.

Only if by today you mean 1950.

The picture on Wikipedia dates from a ~2004 paper but is apparently updated; the 2004 data was well above the Holocene peak, and 2016 is even higher. We were (in pre-industrial times) only a half-degree cooler, and we’ve since warmed a full degree.

This thread is apocalypse defeatist porn, almost akin to the reverse of a forum of fundamentalists praying for the rapture, and reading it was incredibly obnoxious. You are all nearly as short sighted as the people who claim climate change doesn't exist.

This very article is about how animals cannot adapt quickly enough to changes brought about by global warming. When those same changes are spread over thousands of years, it is easier for species to adapt. But that is not what is happening in the real world right now.

Yes, I saw that. I was disagreeing with that premise.

Get your idea published in the peer-reviewed literature, and then we can discuss the merits of it like adults. But if all you have is bald assertion, all we need is bald rejection.

This IS the 6th Great Extinction. Generally the more complex, larger animals at the top of food chains, that commandeer the greatest resource (recall the ratio of ~10 for each level in a food chain) go extinct. That means H sapiens, though this doesn't seem to have penetrated the minds of many.

I agree but a lot of people respond to that by saying "Oh we're really clever, we can do all these things, we can adapt to anything."They forget that we have been adaptable recently due to cheap energy (e.g. aircon in the Southern US). The end of cheap energy is going to coincide with the greatest climate stress. At some point population crash will make an adaptable technological society impossible, and resource wars will do the rest.And we'll go the way of the hominids that, I suspect, we exterminated.

I like an apocalyptic story on a Sunday morning as much as any evangelist on the corner does, but there’s a couple holes in your argument:1. Energy is getting cheaper.2. Population crashes don’t cause resource wars.

The problem with your simplistic reply to my post is that you ignored the causality I mentioned.

Energy is only getting cheaper if you have a developed technological society with the manufacturing capacity to produce things like wind turbines and solar panels, and constantly improve them. Increased temperatures can have many adverse effects: reduction in river flow that means nuclear plants have to shut down; increased storm strength that may destroy wind turbines; increased cloud cover that reduces the output of solar panels, for instance. Oil and gas extraction are part of the problem.It's wrong to think, therefore, that population crashes and resource wars are mutually incompatible. Development charities in Africa have commented that some areas are poor because they have too few people. You need a certain population density to maintain roads, irrigation channels, fertiliser plants and the like, and to support reasonably efficient farming. If you've destroyed much of your rain forest and replaced it with soya monoculture, and then you can't get your chemicals and run your irrigation, the farming output can become too small to support the population - and then you will get resource wars even as the population falls.A Western population that increasingly barely knows where the food in supermarkets comes from is not well equipped to cope with a catastrophic drop in food production or imports.But if it is armed to the teeth, then part of it will find ways of holding on to the remaining resources - and that's going to be shooting wars.

I agree it is easy to become pessimistic, but responding to it as you do by writing about "plot holes" doesn't contribute to providing balance because your simplistic "A produces B" argument doesn't take into account what Nassim Taleb calls "Black swan events" - events which taken on their own have limited downside, but whose interaction with other related events occurring elsewhere becomes catastrophic.

We are talking about a degree of change here, a few degrees Fahrenheit, and treating it like it is any different from imagining that turning up the thermostat 5 degrees will kill your pets. This is absurd.

Last week in the UK we reached 32C where I live; normal summer highs are around 28. There have been reports of dogs dying because people took them out and they became dehydrated.Our local wildlife protection area has nearly dried up and we are maintaining water supplies for birds and small mammals.Yes, a 5 degree rise may kill your pets.

If we presume the animals in question have existed for more than a few thousand years, and if we accept that holocene climatic optimum was warmer than today, and we see that the animals survived that, then the argument that the modern climate will kill these animals is obviously not accurate.

It is, but you are making an argument appropriate if we were talking about climate change. We are actually talking about effects of a changed climate on animals. In other words, if the climate allows the animals to reproduce, they continue to exist. It makes little difference whether the temperature is achieved over 10,000 years or 1 year, what matters is, can the animal still reproduce in the new temperature? Apparently, yes. These animals will be fine for up to another 0.5C to 1 C raise, based on history.

This very article is about how animals cannot adapt quickly enough to changes brought about by global warming. When those same changes are spread over thousands of years, it is easier for species to adapt. But that is not what is happening in the real world right now.

Yes, I saw that. I was disagreeing with that premise. Now, I cannot say I have experience with every animal type, but every animal type I have had experience with has a wide range of ability to deal with environments which are not entirely optimal. We are talking about a degree of change here, a few degrees Fahrenheit, and treating it like it is any different from imagining that turning up the thermostat 5 degrees will kill your pets. This is absurd.

I appreciate the article subject, it is fascinating, but too apocalyptic. I do not see the evidence for the warning sirens on this one. Watching birds for a few seasons and then sounding an alarm is a bit like watching a softball game for the top of the first inning and declaring a winner. Give nature a chance to catch up.

The most specialized species will die out first. If a plant's habitat is continuous, it will move. So the plants which live in grasslands or woods in the U.S. will move north. But some habitats are not continuous. Fresh water lakes, wetlands, mountains, etc. If the nearest appropriate habitat is 500 miles away, plants may not be able to move to new habitats quickly enough. Then animals who rely on those plants will die out. The chain is broken and all sorts of plants and animals will die out.

Generalists like mice, rats, pigeons, etc. will be fine. But specialists will find it much more difficult when the environment they need starts to die out. After a few thousand years the environment will settle down to a new normal and animals will evolve to fill in the newly vacant niches.

A small handful of plants directly and indirectly supply humanities food needs. What happens if the yields of corn, rice, wheat, oats, barley, etc. all go down because the climate has changed enough that the places that they traditionally grow aren't suitable anymore. It can take years to develop the infrastructure to grow plants and transport the food to where its needed.

Our technological development is the root of the cause of the rapid changes. 300000 years of history and in 3 centuries we have almost completely destroyed the biosphere.our changes have made the planet too hot to live without that damning technology.

That 'damning technology' is what extended human lifespan from 30 to 75 in just 100 years. I'm sure you'd be the first to ban hospitals from using all that plastic in their IV bags and tubing?

Where do you get that technology is a binary good or evil? There certainly are large positives to technology as well as perhaps even larger negatives.

This IS the 6th Great Extinction. Generally the more complex, larger animals at the top of food chains, that commandeer the greatest resource (recall the ratio of ~10 for each level in a food chain) go extinct. That means H sapiens, though this doesn't seem to have penetrated the minds of many.

We won't completely wipe ourselves out, but there definitely won't be 8 billion of us by the time it's done. And don't expect the geopolitical pecking order to survive intact.

Someone once asked where we would be without cheap energy, and I replied "the early 18th century." That's where I expect our population to normalize after a few decades of shooting and starving.

I recall hearing about the effect with insect-eating birds being observed five years ago. It is not new, only worse.

Squirrels enjoy baby rabbit, yummy and tender.Big decline in rabbit population when squirrels began being born earlier and rabbits were on the old schedule.Squirrels raided rabbit homes and ate the baby bunnies at an alarming rate.Of course, at that time (2006) squirrels had advanced three weeks in their schedule versus the rabbits only moving one week's worth.As far as I know this only affected Alaska and Canada back then, most likely is more widespread now.The different adaption rates mentioned change the balance.

10 C is more than what is associated with the P-T extinction event (the “great dying”). The K-T event is borderline inconsequential compared to that. And Chixulub was only a portion of the relatively inconsequential event.

I seem to be in pedantic mode today, so....

First, I'm not agreeing with FFLAB's claim that a 10 degree rise is relatively inconsequential.Second, not suggesting that a "merely Chicxulub" level extinction is OK.

But it's worth noting that warming could be greater than that following Chicxulub without causing similar levels of extinction because warming was not the only immediate cause of extinction. So the linear ordering

Pedantic mode off, 10C increase is utter frickin' disaster, could well be on the order of the K-T extinction, and anyone who's telling me it's OK because the comparison point is Chicxulub is only helping confirm that it's an existential threat, so thank you for that.

My claim and likely Wheel’s claim as well: 10 C > P-Tr > K-T

(Fixed a thinko: PETM is the warming coming out of the K-T boundary, I meant the larger extinction event.)

Chicxulub is a subset of K-T. The traps appear to have been significant as well. “We’re warming for a few tens of thousands of years — psych! Let’s blot out the sun for a couple years — ok now we’re warming again.”

Anyway, 10C with no other changes is not possible. We’re also destroying habitat on land, creating hypoxic oceanic zones at the mouths of major rivers, fishing a large fraction of net primary production in the ocean, and releasing lots of pollutants beyond CO2.

We wouldn’t likely see 10C, because we’d be dead long before; if it happens it’s because we cause some major carbon sink to become a self-sustaining source.

Agreed, at 10C I've got to assume we've figured out some way to Venusize the planet.

But on a degree for degree scale, I could believe K-T was worse just because there was so much else going on -- "blotting out the sun for a few years" is a substantial extra punch.

We humans will persevere... but the rest of the biosphere... it's hard to keep being optimistic. And when you tell people about this and they either don't understand or they don't care, you just want to smack them and ask them "What kind of barren shithole planet do you want to leave for your grandchildren?"

As the science becomes more and more clear, year after year, it's starting to look as if the fictional movie "Soylent Green" (based on a Harry Harrison novel) will turn out to be the most accurate prediction science fiction ever made.

Hot, sweaty, over-crowded, everyone eating government dole soy crackers, and the report that the ocean's plankton are dying is covered up.

And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains.Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I'm sorry, what has Trump got to do with this? His contribution to AGW and habitat destruction are not that large in the great scheme of things.It's the contribution of millions and millions of people doing it that's the problem.

Ozymandias is a placeholder for humanity in this case, for the people who say "look at all we've done, we can easily overcome this without a problem".

This IS the 6th Great Extinction. Generally the more complex, larger animals at the top of food chains, that commandeer the greatest resource (recall the ratio of ~10 for each level in a food chain) go extinct. That means H sapiens, though this doesn't seem to have penetrated the minds of many.

Whales existed in prehistoric times and they still exist today.

And humans are way more resourceful than whales.

So? Whales have never faced a mass extinction event.

Actually, they at least faced the ice age. And who knows what else in the 50 million years they have existed as a species.

This IS the 6th Great Extinction. Generally the more complex, larger animals at the top of food chains, that commandeer the greatest resource (recall the ratio of ~10 for each level in a food chain) go extinct. That means H sapiens, though this doesn't seem to have penetrated the minds of many.

Whales existed in prehistoric times and they still exist today.

And humans are way more resourceful than whales.

So? Whales have never faced a mass extinction event.

Actually, they at least faced the ice age. And who knows what else in the 50 million years they have existed as a species.

Whales are mostly plankton eaters. If (likely when) we screw up the oceans enough that the plankton die, then they are all goners. It could be a race to see if they die choked with plastic or of starvation.

This IS the 6th Great Extinction. Generally the more complex, larger animals at the top of food chains, that commandeer the greatest resource (recall the ratio of ~10 for each level in a food chain) go extinct. That means H sapiens, though this doesn't seem to have penetrated the minds of many.

Whales existed in prehistoric times and they still exist today.

And humans are way more resourceful than whales.

So? Whales have never faced a mass extinction event.

Actually, they at least faced the ice age. And who knows what else in the 50 million years they have existed as a species.

I know some may complain about about man-made influences - but hasn't that always been the case? I remember as a kid being taught of an example of moths in the UK, where white moths used to survive better before the industrial age and pollution caused the black moths to be better suited to the environment...

I know some may complain about about man-made influences - but hasn't that always been the case? I remember as a kid being taught of an example of moths in the UK, where white moths used to survive better before the industrial age and pollution caused the black moths to be better suited to the environment...

Yes, it's just the same as any war. So I really don't get why everyone hates wars. They're natural and inevitable, and since nothing can be done about it - then just take it easy, and roll with it